Article
Neurosciences
Raul Ramos, Chi-Hong Wu, Gina G. Turrigiano
Summary: Generalization is an adaptive mnemonic process that allows animals to use past learning experiences to navigate future scenarios. However, overgeneralization is a characteristic feature of anxiety disorders. This study demonstrates that strong conditioning results in a long-lasting generalized aversion that can persist for at least 2 weeks. The synaptic plasticity mechanisms that govern memory generalization and its persistence are explored, showing that strong conditioning leads to a long-lasting increase in synaptic strengths throughout different layers of the gustatory cortex. Repeated exposure to the generalized tastant causes a rapid attenuation of the generalized aversion and a reversal of the conditioning-induced increases in synaptic strength. These changes are more pronounced in the superficial layers. The data suggest that layer-specific synaptic plasticity mechanisms separately govern the persistence and generalization of memory for conditioned taste aversion.
FRONTIERS IN CELLULAR NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Yuqi You, Joshua Brown, Wen Li
Summary: Animal data suggest the sensory cortex plays a critical role in the long-term storage of aversive conditioning, post acquisition and consolidation in the amygdala. Through a human aversive conditioning study, it was found that M-biased conditioned stimuli led to stronger effects, especially in anxious individuals, across threat appraisal, physiological arousal, perceptual learning, and cortical plasticity. The long-term retention of conditioning in the basic sensory cortices supports the conserved role of the human sensory cortex.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Biology
Daichi Yamada, Daniel Bushey, Feng Li, Karen L. Hibbard, Megan Sammons, Jan Funke, Ashok Litwin-Kumar, Toshihide Hige, Yoshinori Aso
Summary: Dopaminergic neurons with distinct properties form memory subsystems in the brain. A feedforward circuit has been identified between dopamine subsystems, which plays a crucial role in second-order conditioning. The hierarchical connections between these subsystems explain the different properties of first- and second-order memory.
Article
Biology
Juan Martinez-Cervantes, Prachi Shah, Anna Phan, Isaac Cervantes-Sandoval, Sonia Sen
Summary: This study reports the sensory preconditioning in fruit flies and the mechanisms that regulate this process. The results show that fruit flies can infer value to olfactory stimuli based on previous associations between odors, and that inhibition of a specific regulator can lengthen the time window of the olfactory 'sensory buffer', allowing the establishment of associations between sequentially presented odors.
Article
Ecology
Christina M. May, Erik B. Van den Akker, Bas J. Zwaan
Summary: Developmental diet has significant effects on gene expression in early life of fruit flies, with larval diet being the major contributor to transcriptional variation, particularly in females. Gene expression in young adult female flies is mainly related to reproduction-related processes influenced by larval diet, while in males, nutrient sensing and metabolic functions are associated with both larval and adult diets.
FRONTIERS IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
(2021)
Article
Entomology
Md Zeeshan Ali, Anushree Anushree, Anwar L. Bilgrami, Aarif Ahsan, Mohammad Shamsul Ola, Rizwanul Haque, Jawaid Ahsan
Summary: Phenylacetaldehyde (PAH), an aromatic odorant, serves as an important food and courtship cue for adult fruit flies. Our study found that larvae are attracted to PAH in a dose-dependent manner and can be trained with PAH as a marker for positive and negative reinforcement. Unlike adult flies, larvae primarily sense PAH through odorant receptors. This study provides valuable insights into how larvae perceive and process PAH odorant at the neural level.
JOURNAL OF INSECT SCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Karita E. Ojala, Athina Tzovara, Benedikt A. Poser, Antoine Lutti, Dominik R. Bach
Summary: Survival in biological environments requires learning associations between predictive sensory cues and threatening outcomes, which may be implemented through reinforcement learning algorithms driven by prediction errors (PEs). This study investigated the neural representation of PEs during maintenance of learned aversive associations using fMRI, revealing that PEs were encoded in the medial prefrontal cortex during the omission of aversive outcomes.
Article
Geriatrics & Gerontology
Eric Le Bourg
Summary: By selecting and imposing restrictions on fruit flies, it was found that adult flies had longer lifespans when their viability was lower, indicating selection for the fittest individuals. However, observing a wild-type strain under different conditions showed that increasing viability did not significantly increase lifespan, suggesting a lack of clear correlation between development and lifespan.
EXPERIMENTAL GERONTOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Biology
Carlotta Pribbenow, Yi-Chun Chen, M-Marcel Heim, Desiree Laber, Silas Reubold, Eric Reynolds, Isabella Balles, Tania Fernandez-d Alquicira, Raquel Suarez-Grimalt, Lisa Scheunemann, Carolin Rauch, Tanja Matkovic, Joerg Roesner, Gregor Lichtner, Sridhar R. Jagannathan, David Owald
Summary: This study found that there is postsynaptic plasticity at cholinergic output synapses in the Drosophila mushroom bodies, which is similar to the memory formation mechanism in vertebrates. The nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunit alpha 5 plays a key role in appetitive memory induction, while the alpha 2 subunits mediate memory expression.
Article
Biology
Megan M. Hoover, Christopher Marks
Summary: Temperature plays a critical role in shaping ectothermic development and later phenotypic expression; mismatches between developmental and adult environments can lead to changes in adult phenotypes; experimental results in fruit flies show that temperature during the embryo stage affects adult size.
JOURNAL OF THERMAL BIOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Cell Biology
Meng-Shiun Wu, Ting-Wei Liao, Chun-Yuan Wu, Tzu-Han Hsieh, Ping-Chung Kuo, Yue-Chiun Li, Kuan-Chung Cheng, Hsueh-Cheng Chiang
Summary: Animals acquire surrounding information for appropriate behavior through social learning and self-learning. However, the regulatory mechanism of social learning, especially in transmitting aversive conditioning information, is still unknown. This study revealed species-dependent differences in how observer flies process aversive conditioning information acquired from demonstrator flies during social learning. Solitary flies, on the other hand, cannot learn this information through social learning, suggesting it is not an innate behavior.
Article
Biology
Elise C. Croteau-Chonka, Michael S. Clayton, Lalanti Venkatasubramanian, Samuel N. Harris, Benjamin M. W. Jones, Lakshmi Narayan, Michael Winding, Jean-Baptiste Masson, Marta Zlatic, Kristina T. Klein
Summary: This study developed a high-throughput training system and demonstrated classical conditioning and operant conditioning in Drosophila larvae for the first time. The results expand our understanding of the associative learning abilities of Drosophila larvae and provide a platform for studying different forms of associative learning and the underlying neural circuits.
Article
Neurosciences
Sanja Klein, Onno Kruse, Isabell Tapia Leon, Lukas Van Oudenhove, Sophie R. van 't Hof, Tim Klucken, Tor D. Wager, Rudolf Stark
Summary: Sharing and comparing imaging data across psychological tasks is becoming more feasible with the advancement of open science movement. This study validates the commonalities between aversive and appetitive classical conditioning through a multivariate approach, providing an empirical method to integrate fMRI findings across paradigms.
Article
Environmental Sciences
Qifang Wu, Xueting Du, Xucong Feng, Huimin Cheng, Yingjun Chen, Chenying Lu, Mingjiang Wu, Haibin Tong
Summary: Exposure to chlordane has been shown to decrease the survival rate of Drosophila and disrupt glucose and lipid metabolism, leading to increased insulin secretion and impaired signaling. Additionally, it results in ROS production, lipid peroxidation, and disruption of redox homeostasis despite the activation of Nrf2 signaling pathway.
ECOTOXICOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SAFETY
(2021)
Article
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Joseph Crapse, Nishant Pappireddi, Meera Gupta, Stanislav Y. Shvartsman, Eric Wieschaus, Martin Wuhr
Summary: The Arrhenius equation is effective in predicting the temperature dependence of complex multi-step biological processes, with significant deviations observed at low and high temperatures.
MOLECULAR SYSTEMS BIOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Behavioral Sciences
David J. Mitchell, Antoine M. Dujon, Christa Beckmann, Pete A. Biro
BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY
(2020)
Article
Psychology, Biological
Peter A. Biro, Frederic Thomas, Beata Ujvari, Bart Adriaenssens, Christa Beckmann
Article
Biology
David J. Mitchell, Regina Vega-Trejo, Alexander Kotrschal
Article
Evolutionary Biology
Frederic Thomas, Mathieu Giraudeau, Nolwenn M. Dheilly, Flora Gouzerh, Justine Boutry, Christa Beckmann, Peter A. Biro, Rodrigo Hamede, Jerome Abadie, Sophie Labrut, Margaux Bieuville, Dorothee Misse, Georgina Bramwell, Aaron Schultz, Guillaume Le Loc'h, Orsolya Vincze, Benjamin Roche, Francois Renaud, Tracey Russell, Beata Ujvari
EVOLUTIONARY APPLICATIONS
(2020)
Review
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Justine Boutry, Antoine M. Dujon, Anne-Lise Gerard, Sophie Tissot, Nick Macdonald, Aaron Schultz, Peter A. Biro, Christa Beckmann, Rodrigo Hamede, David G. Hamilton, Mathieu Giraudeau, Beata Ujvari, Frederic Thomas
Article
Behavioral Sciences
David J. Mitchell, Thomas M. Houslay
Summary: The study of behavioral syndromes aims to understand correlations between different behaviors, while behavioral plasticity explores variations in animal responses to environmental changes. These two phenomena, although closely related, are often discussed separately, leading to a missed opportunity to fully integrate these concepts.
BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Fisheries
Peter A. Biro, John R. Post, Christa Beckmann
Summary: Accumulation of lipid reserves is crucial for the overwinter survival of animals, with fish in productive lakes having higher lipid content and steeper allometric slopes, leading to higher survival rates during winter. This suggests that overwinter mortality exerts a stronger selective pressure on fish populations than previously thought.
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FISHERIES AND AQUATIC SCIENCES
(2021)
Article
Ecology
Benjamin G. Fanson, Kerry V. Fanson, Peter A. Biro
Summary: The study found that repeatability of locomotor activity in Q-flies increased with the carbohydrate content of the diet in different nutritional environments, suggesting that nutrient availability limits the expression of genetic activity. The results highlight the importance of considering the complexities of nutrient content and composition in studies of the evolutionary potential of traits and individual variation in behavior.
EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGY
(2021)
Review
Ecology
David J. Mitchell, Christa Beckmann, Peter A. Biro
Summary: Studies have shown significant and widespread individual differences in residual variance, particularly in behavioral traits. Future research could further explore the ecological and evolutionary implications of individual differences in residual variance.
ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
(2021)
Article
Ecology
Regina Vega-Trejo, Catarina Vila-Pouca, David J. Mitchell, Alexander Kotrschal
Summary: Predation pressure can impact the size and morphology of an individual's brain, but this effect is dependent on the individual's body size.
EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Ornithology
Christa Beckmann, Richard E. Major, Greta J. Frankham, Shina Thomas, Peter A. Biro, Beata Ujvari, Linda Neaves
Summary: The study highlights the threat of habitat loss to the vulnerable Flame Robin species, particularly at high elevations vulnerable to climate change. Genetic diversity among populations shows no significant differences, with limited recent migration likely due to fragmentation.
EMU-AUSTRAL ORNITHOLOGY
(2021)
Review
Oncology
Peter A. Biro, Frederic Thomas, Beata Ujvari, Christa Beckmann
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Tomas O. Cornwell, Ian D. McCarthy, Peter A. Biro